


Vigil

by dome_epais



Category: Jewett - The Country of the Pointed Firs
Genre: F/F, Grief/Mourning, Post-Canon Fix-It
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-14
Updated: 2019-11-14
Packaged: 2021-01-30 19:40:29
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,957
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21433627
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dome_epais/pseuds/dome_epais
Summary: Everyone must keep some space in their hearts for new things to come along.
Relationships: Narrator/Mrs. Almira Todd
Kudos: 2





	Vigil

**Author's Note:**

> Welcome to the first fic, to my knowledge, for a canon published in 1896.
> 
> Thanks to L, my habitual beta and patient listener.

The steamer that ferried supplies in and out of the gray rocky bay of Dunnet’s Landing accommodated myself as a passenger of uncommon, undirected energy one particular day at the end of July. 

There had been a flurry of activity some three hours previously, when the steamer landed in the relative metropolis of Rockland and found herself chartered as a ferry along with a substantial load of groceries. The uninformed eye might assume that so much food and drink were libations meant for a grand wedding, but every person for one hundred miles along the Maine coast knew about the upcoming memorial for Mrs. Blackett of Green Island.

\---

Here was the land I had yearned for. I looked it over carefully, cataloguing every shrub clinging to the cliffs, ever tree interrupting the white, overcast sky. A gust scoured eastward from the Landing and into my face, bringing the sharp green astringence of evergreen firs. I took up the particulars I had to hand and set off with a purpose.

Before I could make for the gangplank to the salt-blackened pier, the ship’s boatswain waylaid me to extract specific instructions regarding my heavier luggage. Having been so long away, I could not count on my welcome from my previous host, and was not sure which of my acquaintances might suffer my company.

“Mr. Tilley,” I offered, considering carefully. “Do you know if Elijah Tilley still lives along the shore?” In truth, whether the old fisherman still lived at all was in some doubt.

The boatswain knew him immediately. “Old widow’r Tilley? Sure he’s ther’.”

I arranged for my possessions to be delivered to Mr. Tilley’s home whenever they could be accessed. As we spoke, in the few minutes since reaching the pier, the center hatch of the deck lay open and the first of the large cargo was swaying up on a long pulley-winch system. 

The boatswain squinted up at the crates suspended in the rigging, then nodded out to sea, where Green Island lay some distance off the shore in the verdant mantle of summer. “Shame about Mis’ Blackett, ain’t it?”

“A shame,” I agreed, and finally took the longed-for steps across the gangplank and down the pier, until the soles of my shoes rested on the damp pebbled clay revealed by the low tide. Then, I could breathe out, a long journey concluded.

But I breathed in again, tasting the fir in my throat, and set my shoulders. There was visiting to be done. 

I set out again on an even greater mission to locate one Mrs. Almira Todd,  née Blackett.

\--

I knew that she wouldn’t be at home. Of all places in the world, I didn’t think to find Mrs. Todd shut up in her house when there were but three days before a flood of visitors would descend upon her hospitality in remembrance of her late mother. There must be a dozen housewives in Dunnet Landing cooking in a steady marathon, and each would need personal supervision and instruction. Mrs. Todd could not forgo calling on a neighbor, mourning or no.

The windy, sunless hike up the switchback path in the cliffs was occupied with prevaricating about my real destination. Perhaps I would walk right past her house and onward up the slope to the schoolhouse, my one-time haven. Perhaps I might pass one of Mrs. Todd’s neighbors and inquire about her location. Perhaps I could gain a better vantage point to observe Green Island as it rose from the water.

Instead, inevitably, I marched up to the water-stained picket fence of Mrs. Todd’s herbal pharmacopoeia and halted, unable to set one foot closer to the little house shouldered in among the evergreens, huddling against the wind. The roof was new-shingled perhaps one or two winters past, but little had otherwise changed since my departure from this place. The red-slatted shutters and whitewashed door had been wiped of accumulated dust. The front step was swept, and a mat of knotted rope invited any passers-by to stop in. I could detect by my nose alone that Mrs. Todd had not spent time in her garden today, leaving no leaf twisted nor stem broken.

The long summer spent in writing and visiting this town sluiced through me, a flash flood that disturbed and eddied the detritus of my heart. How I had basked in the gentle rhythms of this little enclave! How I had frittered my allowance of time away, until I departed in a wrenching up of newly transplanted roots! And the day I left, denied a farewell --

“Oh, I hadn’ta heard you’d be comin’,” Mrs. Dennett called from her kitchen window next door, breaking me from my reverie. 

“Yes,” I answered through a tight throat, grasping for appropriate words to disguise my loitering. 

My one-time neighbor made a short, perfunctory nod. “A shame about Mis’ Blackett,” she offered, as if this phrase had entered the common parlance as a universal greeting.

“A shame,” I returned, making for the path once more and discreetly wiping my stinging eyes of any salt.

\--

Once I undertook my search for Mrs. Todd in earnest, I learned from a Bowden relation that she made near-daily trips out to Green Island since her mother passed some six weeks ago, and that her boat left on the ebb tide. She would return in a few hours, when the tide turned.

I lingered on the pier and gazed over the waves at Green Island -- searching for a sail, or, failing that, some indication about the best course from this point. 

Left instead to my own ends, I decided to make for my impromptu host.

Mr. Tilley’s place was a sore tooth of wood in the clay and jutting vertical rocks at the edge of the wave line. Not seeing a light inside, I knocked at the door and again looked out over Penobscot Bay, wondering if the fishing trawlers may still be out, after noon though it was.

The door opened presently. Elijah Tilley stood in the frame, hunched by the heavy weight of time. He recognized me immediately. “Why, why. Welc’me back to the Landing.”

“Mr. Tilley,” I greeted him warmly, “I am so pleased to see you.” I might own that this wasn’t the greatest share of my pleasure in coming back to this lonely corner of the country, but I meant it sincerely. His loving digressions about his late wife were an expression of a peculiar characteristic of the Landing; that of being unstuck in time, returning to the point of greatest joy. I had often wished him the choicest catch of haddock from afar.

“C’me in,” he invited. “There’ll be s’me tea.”

I ventured within and noted the decor and mementos on display, meticulously preserved. I might have left only this morning, not four years past. The widower’s devotion to his departed wife was unflagging, more than a decade since her passing.

“Shame about Mis’ Blackett,” Mr. Tilley intoned solemnly.

“Such a shame,” I chorused, then pressed further. “How has Mrs. Todd taken the loss?”

Mr. Tilley fussed with measuring a few pinches of his meager reserve of tea leaves. He grunted, “Oh, she’s a fine one. It’s her brother’s feelin’ it worst.”

I sent a fond pang of sympathy out to William, the shy man who spent his time fishing in solitude and gained most of his socializing from his mother, even when he was above sixty years in age and she coming on ninety. “Has he been to the Landing, or stayed on Green Island?”

“Stayed out ther’, I reckin.” Mr. Tilley handed over a mug of weak tea, hot to the palms of my hands. “Ain’t heard of his coming around. I don’t hear too much, though,” he said, and I heard it in his voice. There was a unique tension in his throat at these times, when he thought of her, his lost wife. “O’ course, poor dear would’a called on that William first thing, and she ‘steemed Mis’ Blackett very hi’ly. Would’a been part of the effort for the wake, and for this m’morial in a few days…”

“Mr. Tilley,” I cut in, hoping to divert his grief a few moments more, “will you be attending the memorial?”

He grunted, “‘Course. E’ryone will.”

“Might I impose on your hospitality until then?” I requested. “I couldn’t ask Mrs. Todd at a time like this.”

“‘Course, ‘course,” he agreed, far away from me already. “Poor dear would’a called on William. ‘Specially finding Mis’ Blackett as he did. Not a bad way to go, all quiet, in her own bed. But poor dear, she had a comforting word for all His creation.”

I let him dwell in his memories for a time. The tea was just the right temperature now to suffuse me with warmth, weak or no. There was no rush; no sense of urgency could survive in Dunnet Landing, where hours were measured against the tide, and minutes in the sets of crashing waves. I had a few days before the ceremony to find the words for a meeting with Mrs. Todd. I would also need to locate William, no easier task than catching a shadow on a sunny day. I could solve these puzzles as they came.

“Will the flood tide arrive before dinner?” I asked Mr. Tilley, following the path of my musing.

Mr. Tilley had been quiet for a similar length. He stared at me with the complete perplexion of a man who reads the tide by the sole of his feet. “S’re ‘t will. Oh, two hours, say.”

This allowed me two hours to await my luggage and watch for a sail returning from Green Island. The clouds gradually began to clear, opening up vast tracts of blue sky, bringing the sunlight down to the white-capped sea.

\--

The clean smell of the firs lifted strands of hair from my bun and tickled my nose as I watched a single small sail tack against the headwind to enter the rocky bay. The sharp fresh tang of the crushed needles trailed my steps along the edge of the trees from my vantage point part way up the cliffs.

Mrs. Todd had packed my trunk with moth-repellent rosemary and fir needles at the conclusion of my summer visit, that day she refused to exchange farewells. I kept the sachet pouches as mementos until the herbs were brittle and dry. For many months, I could snap a needle between my finger and thumb and stand again at the foot of the Atlantic. The sappy residue transported me back to Mrs. Todd and her herbal tinctures, the hours whiled away in gathering blossoms and roots in our aprons, conversation topics scuttling along like clouds.

I had eventually run out of needles. The evergreens of my hometown made poor substitutes. At just the right moment of wistful nostalgia, the state newspaper published news of the passing of a venerable pillar of the Penobscot Bay community. I wrapped up my writing commissions and headed out in the hopes of beating the memorial, planned far enough out to allow the grief-stricken mourners to travel from far and wide across the state.

How different was I from any other well-wisher come to pay my last respects to Mrs. Blackett’s vibrant flame of life? I loved her as a sweetly doting aunt, for the short time I dwelled as a boarder in her daughter’s home. Mrs. Blackett had, in turn, enveloped me in her community, a spider-web of intermarriage that penetrated deep into the backcountry and along the many pockets and loops of the coastline. So complete was her welcome that today, years later, no one in Dunnet's Landing blinked an eye at my arrival for the occasion of Mrs. Blackett’s death, without any kind of message in advance. 

The single sail I had marked now rounded the last saw-toothed rock and began to luff, the canvas membrane rippling as the wind spilled away. The boat’s navigator was identifiable by her silver hair mounded atop a ponderous, self-assured profile.

In the outpouring of warm regard at the dear sight of Mrs. Todd, I was forced to admit without reservation that my return to Dunnet Landing was not for Mrs. Blackett’s sake, but for her daughter’s. 

I started to pick my way down the cliffs to the Landing once more. Mrs. Todd saw me before gaining the pier and gave a nod of recognition. She remained stern and alert for some time, giving instructions to the lad handling the rigging - presumably one of many young cousins at varying attenuated degrees of removal. Once the boat smoothly skidded into its berth, the lad scrambled out to twist the hawser rope around the bollard to secure the vessel in its mooring.

Mrs. Todd busied herself with the multitude of small maintenances that accompany any boat, even one hired for the day. Then she said, “You done well today, Jimmy. Run along home, now. I’ll see you or your brother out here tomorrow morning, ‘s ’at so?”

“‘Course, Mis’ Todd,” the lad answered, and ran off with the boundless energy of a teenager.

Mrs. Todd heaved her tall and solid weight out of the stern, sending the boat buoyant and rocking with the sudden relief from her burden. Then - finally - then, she turned to scrutinize me with the sharp, comprehensive assessment of a medical practitioner.

“You’ve heard about Mrs. Blackett, then,” Mrs. Todd observed after a few moments, the absence of her habitual good nature leaving her mouth at an unhappy slant. “‘T’s a shame,” she observed stoically, no more moved than if she was noting unfavorable weather for a picnic.

“It’s a shame,” I echoed, then shook my head at the rote platitude. “I’m so sorry, Almira. I know how you cherished her.”

Mrs. Todd -- forever carrying her title, not her christian name -- accepted my condolences with the philosophical pragmatism of six long weeks of routine. “She went peacefully. Alone, as may be, but in her sleep, in her own bed. Still as spry as a squirrel. She wouldn’t have liked no slow decline. Kept her health and took it right to the pearly gates at ninety-two,” she declared with no small measure of pride and satisfaction.

She took a long look over her shoulder at Green Island, glowing golden in the afternoon sunlight, that craggy land her mother had ruled over like a feudal lord for better than seven decades. When she turned back, her smile was dawning, one ray of light at a time. “Thank ye for comin’. ‘T would mean much t’ her. She mentioned ye often, and remembered you wi’ th’ gentlest affection.”

Her warm approbation touched a mirrored sentiment tied to the core of my heart left too long unexamined. “I feel the same -- that is, I --” My voice stuttered into mortified silence. I clenched my jaw and tried to will away the prickling of my eyes. I could not weep in front of Mrs. Todd, who suffered this loss infinitely more acutely than I. What a mess I had made of this reunion!

But Mrs. Todd read the sincerity from my face and simply said, “I’m glad to hear ‘t. Come up for some supper.”

\--

I was about a decade younger than Mrs. Todd, who was seventy now. However, I was unaccustomed to the steep climb to her house, let alone making the trip twice in one day. Despite the strain, I was glad that I had made my earlier reunion with the house alone. If I had first set eyes on it with my heart sore and short of breath, I might have fainted away and woken in a fog of Mrs. Todd’s most pungent smelling-salts.

Even so, I paused at the threshold of Mrs. Todd’s garden until she asked, “Well, shall I engrave an invitation for ye?” Even knowing my welcome, this spurred me forward.

Coming through the front door seemed to set us right back into our previous friendship of candid disclosure and common feeling. Mrs. Todd bustled about her kitchen and recounted the local news as she had done many nights while I rented her spare room. So-and-so was married, you-know-who made a public scene. The familiar cadence of her voice drew me to sit at the table and talk over anything that came to mind, from my published writing to my future projects.

“Ye could always rent out th’ schoolhouse again. ‘T’s empty for th’ rest of summer,” Mrs. Todd suggested in an offhand joke. 

_ Was _ it a joke?

I replied cautiously, “It’s quite a walk up from Mr. Tilley’s place.”

She frowned down at the dough she was kneading with her strong, practiced hands. “What’s this ‘bout ‘Lijah Tilley?”

“I’m staying with him until the memorial.”

Her hands stilled in the dough, which slowly folded over her wrists. “What’re you talking ‘bout? You’re staying here.”

Stay in this house full of bittersweet memories. My room - the room I once rented - either the same or changed in all the subtle, awful details of another tenant. 

The fir branches creaked along the glass of the kitchen window, in a gust of wind that stirred the aroma of a hundred different leaves drying among the rafters. My heart thumped a few wild beats along my throat, in my ears. I teetered on a precipice.

Mrs. Todd’s eyes dulled with the pain of an unlooked-for comfort abruptly withdrawn. She thumped the dough and bravely allowed, “You needn’t stay here. Never mind me.”

“Almira,” I protested, “of course I’ll stay, if it won’t be an imposition on you.”

“Never,” she said, folding her dough double and double again. “There’s plenty here. Who else will eat it?”

\--

Over supper, I explained that my luggage was at Mr. Tilley’s house, and I wasn’t eager to retrieve it tonight, although the sun had not yet set. Mrs. Todd waved this off as a concern for Jimmy and his brother in the morning and simply passed word through the neighbors that Mr. Tilley should not expect me back tonight.

“I’ll lend you something to wear,” she offered magnanimously. She was considerably broader and taller than I -- the thought only had to enter my mind for her to giggle like a girl having fellow conspirator stay the night. “Well, if my clothes don’t fit you, you needn’t wear them.”

This transgression of manners startled a loud laugh out of me, and she was galloping away, teasing me into a fluster over leaving all my clothes at the house of Elijah Tilley, a single man.

“That man is still married in his heart,” I contradicted her.

“Plenty o’ folks are married in the’r heart,” she agreed, “but widow’d folks are single in the eyes of the Church and the law.”

I sobered, sensitive to her own enduring widowhood from a young age. “If you’re thinking of Nathan--”

“Nathan Todd was a sweet, dear man,” she interrupted me.

“Yes, of course,” I quickly affirmed, although he was gone decades before I met Mrs. Todd. Worried that I had invoked the specter of her deceased husband, I excused myself to my room in the hope that the subject would be firmly closed behind me.

The spare room. The room I had rented, once, years gone.

I entered with undue caution, as if Mrs. Todd might have forgotten that she already had a tenant, and I would surprise them asleep in the bed.

In every detail, from the finely-blocked quilt to the sprig of mint in the window, the room showed no sign that another soul apart from Mrs. Todd had entered since I left it. The perfect preservation recalled Elijah Tilley’s lasting devotion, the way he shuffled around the space his wife’s ghost claimed as her own. 

The ache of departure pierced me anew. Four years ago, Mrs. Todd had filled up that doorway and turned away without a goodbye. She hurried from the house and left me to board the steamer away from Dunnet's Landing with only a few gifts to remember her by, no final kind word or invitation to return.

Except the fir needles scenting my trunk, permeating every article of clothing with the trace of the Maine summer air. 

\--

The sun set among the arrow-pointed fir trees, splaying long fingers of red-orange light along the waves, lingering the longest on Green Island. I watched the shadows advance up the rocks to the place I recalled Mrs. Blackett’s house to lie.

Beside me, Mrs. Todd plaited three ropes together, inserting the stem of a long green bean pod between each twist, preparing the pods to dry for the next spring’s planting. The braid already nearly reached the floor, a spiral of dormant life.

Once twilight gathered close to the house, I turned instead to admire Mrs. Todd’s swift work and unerringly skilled fingers. My handwriting and sewing were precise, but I possessed no practical skills of the sort I discovered in Mrs. Todd moment by moment. She was a miracle to me. 

“Wasn’t there anyone?” I asked, in the low murmur of our truly intimate exchanges. “After Nathan?” I couldn’t imagine that no one had seen this side of my dear friend when she was still a young woman. She might have remarried, had children. “You’re such a marvel.”

Mrs. Todd slid a quick, careful glance in my direction. “My vow was ‘till death, an’ I kept ‘t. Everyone must keep s’me space in the’r hearts for new things t’ come along,” she pronounced virtuously. “What ‘bout yerself? Did ye never think t’ marry?”

“It was suggested once or twice,” I allowed, casting back through the fog of decades and long indifference. “None would quite suit.”

Her hands paused in their work. She coaxed, “Would you consider ‘t now?”

“Now? I’m an old woman, now.”

“Everyone must keep s’me space in the’r hearts for new things t’ come along,” Mrs. Todd repeated, looking at her hands, the rope slackening between her fingers. Decisively, she looped the ropes into a slipknot and set the braid aside. Then, she closed her hand around mine, fingers in the cup of my palm.

I stared at our hands in mute astonishment, overwhelmed by the physical reality of the new weight resting over my knee.

Mrs. Todd met my eyes earnestly. “Stay,” she asked me. “Stay here in Dunnet's Landing after mother’s memorial. For th’ rest o’ summer, ‘t least.”

Not earnest, I corrected.  _ Ardent. _

The impossibility of it all came over the horizon, barreling toward me in a gale. She had never said goodbye - had not allowed me to say it - out of the passionate wish not to part ways forever. She had kept my room for my one-day return, living on the scraps of hope, all while fir needles crumbled between my fingers and I mutely yearned for her. 

What if I was never far from her thoughts, as she had never strayed far from mine?

Once a place carves into your heart with every peak and valley in the finest detail, there can be no leaving forever. A part must stay behind, trapped or kept, fostered and nursed into bloom. Mrs. Todd had made room for the part of me that stayed - the part that was tied to Dunnet Landing, the tides, the people. 

I gripped her hand. When this was not enough, I put my other hand on her shoulder. “Almira,” I said, helpless, adrift in a sea of wanting and having.

“Ssh,” she soothed me, and touched my neck, my cheek. “Hush. Just say ye’ll stay.”

“I will. I will. Almira,” I pleaded more urgently, and leaned closer to her.

She kissed me. We were both long out of practice, but gentleness and love carried us the rest of the way. 


End file.
